Harvard Course on Positive Psychology: Watch 30 Lectures from the University’s Extremely Popular Course

Sev­er­al years back Tal Ben-Sha­har taught a course on Pos­i­tive Psy­chol­o­gy at Har­vard, which became, at least for a while, the most pop­u­lar course at the uni­ver­si­ty. About the course NPR wrote: “Twice a week, some 900 stu­dents attend Tal Ben-Sha­har’s class on what he calls ‘how to get hap­py.’ … His class offers research from the rel­a­tive­ly new field of pos­i­tive psy­chol­o­gy, which focus­es on what makes peo­ple hap­py, rather than just their patholo­gies.”

Avail­able in an admit­ted­ly grainy for­mat, you can watch the 30 lec­tures from that course above, or over on YouTube. Accord­ing to the orig­i­nal syl­labus, top­ics dis­cussed include “hap­pi­ness, self-esteem, empa­thy, friend­ship, love, achieve­ment, cre­ativ­i­ty, music, spir­i­tu­al­i­ty, and humor.”

If you’re inter­est­ed in delv­ing deep­er into Pos­i­tive Psy­chol­o­gy, we’d rec­om­mend Tal Ben-Sha­har’s books: Hap­pi­er: Learn the Secrets to Dai­ly Joy and Last­ing Ful­fill­ment and Short Cuts to Hap­pi­ness: Life-Chang­ing Lessons from My Bar­ber. The same goes for read­ing the works of Mar­tin Selig­man, the Uni­ver­si­ty of Penn­syl­va­nia pro­fes­sor who effec­tive­ly invent­ed the field. You can also take free cours­es on Pos­i­tive Psy­chol­o­gy. Just head over to our col­lec­tion of Free Psy­chol­o­gy Cours­es, a sub­set of our meta col­lec­tion, 1,700 Free Online Cours­es from Top Uni­ver­si­ties.

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Relat­ed Con­tent:

What Are the Keys to Hap­pi­ness?: Take “The Sci­ence of Well-Being,” a Free Online Ver­sion of Yale’s Most Pop­u­lar Course

Intro­duc­tion to Psy­chol­o­gy: A Free Course from Yale Uni­ver­si­ty

A Crash Course on Psy­chol­o­gy: A 30-Part Video Series from Hank Green

All You Need is Love: The Keys to Hap­pi­ness Revealed by a 75-Year Har­vard Study